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There have been some interesting results in relation to the Hugo Awards, and to the broader WorldCon environment. Kevin Standlee, a previous chair of the World Science Fiction Society (the WorldCon runners) posts Elections have Consequences:
The Hugo Nomination statistics were released on Friday, and unsurprisingly there are some oddities. Some of the disqualifications are likely politically charged over Chinese-specific matters, and others more universal. To be fair, the exact rules for qualification are complex, and some past nominees have been screwed over by esoterica of first publication dates; given the number of new voters, it's not too surprising that some nominated works fell outside of the eligibility timeline.
To be somewhat less charitable, I'm not familiar with too many previous times where nominees were listed as eligible by associated vendors before getting disqualified. The nominations are also bizarre in other ways, if one expected a largely Chinese fandom: there's a few Chinese-original pieces and editors, but not many.
Officially, there was absolutely no political pressure for these decisions, which have an explanation that the WorldCon Chendgu admins won't be providing.
On one hand, it's hard to be surprised if something wacky happened, and surely the people who set up WorldCon inside the CCP should have known it'd be a charlie foxtrot one way or the other. It's even part of the WorldCon bylaws that given a lot of power to the laws of the hosting nation, as Standlee points out. WorldCon locations are determined by member votes, even if this rounds out a little weird.
On the other hand, there were some fun questions about exactly how fair that vote for the 2023 WorldCon bid was well before this point -- quite a lot of ballots were allegedly filled out remotely and dropped off by a small number of visitors. Which wasn't and currently isn't against the rules, mind you! And the WSFS certainly wouldn't bring up questions of authenticity in 2021.
((On the gripping hand, unlike nearly every other vote at WorldCon, the location vote is heavily vetted internally rather than going through a member nominee process; only sufficiently prepared locales are listed. And WorldCon Chengdu advocates had been wining-and-dining hard for a while, which, given the logistical issues the convention had that included a complete rescheduling, might have been descisive.))
Schadenfruede isn't great for the soul, so to some extent I'm pretty happy to that a number of critics of modern WorldCon have had better things to do with their time, even if I personally have struggled not to snark a bit. And it's hard to expect too much to come from any retrospective at this point: because ballots and nominations, proving or disproving any tomfoolery incoherent as a position; more likely, it ends up with some minor tweaks to the location bid process, and just becomes one of those weird bits of fan lore, like when people wonder why Mercedes Lackey disappeared from SFWA conferences.
It's already too late to pass out the Asterisk Awards v2, and most of the winners weren't bad; many would have won regardless, even if the novel slot is definitely curious. ((Though I'm definitely less-than-happy that Scalzi squeaked in a nomination on another terrible work because of the DQ's)). Which brings up the culture war side. Standlee has an example :
To be fair, Standlee gets pushback, and eventually admits that no, that's not actually the existing law. I expect if pressed hard enough, he'd even admit it would surprise him were a Florida WorldCon's subcommittee willing to comply with such a law. (To be a little less charitable, he's probably going to be a go-to example for people on the left assuming conservative jurisdictions will ignore courts orders, if only because most people use video format or circumlocutions). And perhaps there are uses to bringing forward a nearby hypothetical over a distant reality (and, tbf, the at-least-up-as-a-bid-but-still-implausible WorldCon Uganda gets some attention on File 770).
But it's a slightly awkward comparison. It's not like either of these hypotheticals are really things this cohort experience personally, or even by second- or third-hand. Yet they're useful boogeymen.
Is there a reason to care about these conferences? I think every time I've seen a list of the books that won awards I'd never read a single one, and never had any interest in reading them from the descriptions. That isn't a criticism of the conference, I have very weird and esoteric reading preferences so its not a surprise when my preferences aren't mirrored by these conventions.
Let them have their weird little conference where they pretend to be super progressive, and then also hold the conference in a country with active censorship.
With many other culture war issues I get why there is a fight. The universities should not just be surrendered. The institutions should not just be surrendered. The competitions and sports that are location based should not just be surrendered. The licensers and certifiers should not be surrendered. This though? I don't know why you'd want to save it or fight for it. Just let them go off the deep end.
They still hold the once-honored name of Hugo Gernsbeck, but that's the only reason. The Sad Puppies have apparently decided that now that the other guys won by breaking the awards, they can have both pieces.
If I ever get rich or famous I'm going to include something in my will about not naming things after me. After half a century I'm sure that thing will not reflect any of my values. Happens in the think tank world all the time. Conservative/libertarian think tanks get infiltrated by leftists and become skin suits worn by people that the founder would have hated. In the Koch network some places don't even have the patience and decency to wait until both Koch brothers are dead.
I've given a lot of thought to the issue of how you can set up a foundation with your name on it and expect it to stay aligned with your intentions over the course of decades. It's hard, way too many failure modes and attack surfaces you'd have to anticipate and design countermeasures for.
Even in the best case scenario, all it really takes is the last person who knew you when you were alive to die or retire and get replaced by someone who has no connection to you and no respect for your ideals, and then there's no mechanism for forcing adherence to your goals. They turn the ship in a different direction and sail on unabated.
No matter how rigorously you define your terms and how stringent you make your instructions, over time your org will be Ship-of-Theseused into something with the same name and generally the same stated purpose but controlled by actors who may be actively hostile to your desired legacy.
You can hand-pick your successors, but once you're gone there's little guarantee those successors can manage to handpick good successors without serious entropy setting in.
The example that strikes me the most is the Ford Foundation which controls a $16,000,000,000 endowment, and has the stated purpose:
But when you look at where they actually spend the money, it is pretty indistinguishable from any other standard lefty activist organization.
Underscored by this excerpt from the Wiki:
So yeah, the direct descendant of the guys who set up and funded the Foundation quit because it was falling afar from it's original mission and was becoming anti-capitalist using funds provided by some of the most famous Capitalists of all time.
Took less than 50 years. I can barely imagine how one could ensure your legacy lasts 200 years without losing focus... short of founding a religion with fanatical adherents. I suppose you could pay to train an LLM that will spout your values and is given an endowment of its own to ensure it has server time secured for itself in perpetuity.
The whole problem is that if your foundation controls significant wealth, that will attract all kinds of parasites and scavengers to the 'free calories' and nature will then take its course once there are none remaining to defend the bounty.
Just have the state confiscate it. The inheritance tax is among the fairest of them all. If the state can deprive living, breathing humans of the fruits of their labour, it should most definitely squeeze the dead for contributions. Those zombie orgs have no right to exist in the first place.
One could perhaps imagine parasites gaining influence and control at the state if that's where all the wealth accumulates at the end of people's lives.
Hard to imagine, but seems like a risk.
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